Development and Psychometric Tests of the Chinese Version of Patient Satisfaction With Nurse Practitioner Scale

Background: Patient satisfaction is a common indicator of patient care outcome. It has been included in the hospital accreditation standards by Taiwan Joint Commission since 2008. An instrument of patient satisfaction targeted to evelauate care outcomes that provide by nurse practitioners is rarely found in a review of literatue.

Purpose:The purpose of this study was to develop and test psychometric properties of the Chinese version of patient satisfaction with nurse practitioner scale (C-PSNP).

Method: There were three phases of development in Chinese version of patient satisfaction with nurse practitioner scale. The first phase was to conduct literature review and focus group, that constructs the content of the questionnaire to measure patient satisfaction with nurse practitioner. The second phase was to test the construct validity of the C-PSNP scale. The third phase was to conduct a cross- sectional survey that used a convenience sample by recruiting 230 patients from four hospitals. The survey yield 230 validated questionnaires that collected from February to May, 2016. The data collected form the questionnaires had analyzed by SPSS 19.0. Statistical analysis including item analysis, Pearson correlations, exploratory factor analysis and reliability of Cronbach's α with the C-PSNP scale.

Result: The 20-item C-PSNP scale was developed, with a item discrimination CR (critical ratio) of 7.46–15.41 (p < .001), and item-total correlation of .61–.86 (p < .001). Exploratory factor analysis had extracted four factors, and they explained a total variance of 78.19%. Four factors were named as "communication and caring", "health information", "professional knowlege and skills", and "participation in decision-making". The Cronbach's α for the C-PSNP scale was .96. The Cronbach's α coefficients of four subscales were in an range of .88 - .94.

Conclusion: This study demonstrated the Chinese version of patient satisfaction with nurse practitioner scale is a valid and reliable tool that is recommended to use as an assessment tool for measuring the patient satisfaction with Taiwanese nurse practitioners.